MediaGaggle asks: Can one foreign correspondent save a nation? That sounds impossible in this era when American media outlets are dramatically slashing foreign bureaus and leaving most of the world uncovered.
Enter OPC member Roy Gutman, who exposed a network of concentration camps run by Bosnian Serbs, where Muslims were beaten, starved and often murdered. Some 5,000 to 6,000 lives were saved, after Gutman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting in Newsday.
In ghastly scenes mirroring Hitler’s concentration camps, images of
desperate civilians clinging to life shocked the world. Whole villages
were deported and thousands of Bosnian women were systematically raped
by Bosnian Serbs from 1992-1995.
It’s heartbreaking to imagine what would have happened today if a
reporter asked editors if he could spend six months chasing a story in
Bosnia with an interpreter and photographer. Those death camps probably
would have gone uncovered – like much of the world.
Newsday has closed all of its foreign bureaus, and most major media
outlets have abandoned foreign posts. Vast corners of the world have
been deserted by the American press at a time when there has never been
a greater need for investigative reporting.
It took Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina leaders 17 years to belatedly
shine the spotlight on Gutman, 66, one of America’s finest foreign
correspondents. On the 65th anniversary of the city’s liberation after
World War II, Gutman quietly took the stage recently in Sarajevo and
was handed the keys to the city and made an honorary citizen.
“I’m walking on air,” said Gutman in an interview with Media
Gaggle. “It’s a terrific honor. It’s ironic getting a key from a city
that has no gates and could never be surrounded by a wall because it is
in the valley.”
Gutman’s stories helped mobilize the United Nations and other
Western governments to establish the International Criminal Tribunal
for former Yugoslavia in 1993. Since then dozens of war criminals have
been convicted and jailed.
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